Shiva EX IMO was the best fight in ARR. It was scripted, but also incredibly random. If you get nothing but swords, healing was super easy, but if you got nothing but staff...pure chaos. I really loved the fight as a healer for that reason.
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Depends on the stat difference between a content's entry level gear requirements and BiS. Going from a roughly x1.10 power increase for every 10 ilevels to a x1.05 power increase over the same period has a significant influence on how fast content is out geared/overgeared.
Or just lower the cast time of Stone, Glare and Broil to 2, 1.75 or 1.5 seconds and every problem is solved. I do not know why the devs are so insistent on keeping Stone, Glare and Broil at 2.5 seconds. The worst that would happen is WHM gains too much mobility and starts doing a ton of damage because it never clip anymore, which who cares? Almost all jobs have mobility now anyway and WHM has no raid utility aside from damage reduction.
Has to be AST. They already gutted us WHM for all the role skills.
The devs actually got rid of healer role utility skills like Protect and Stoneskin quite a while ago from how messily they were implemented. Just cast both at the start of an instance and that would pretty much be that. The devs just deleted our versions of them for SB and no one really cared.
I always understood that the fundamental design with healers in FFXIV since 2.0 is that any and all healer DPS in group content is just a bonus. Our DPS options becoming so simplified is just so we can functionally play solo while keeping the focus on our role. It has the side effect of our complaints of healers being boring as DPS also meaning we have fellow players good enough to not need us to break out our larger healing kits. I think the devs would sooner nerf our heal potencies than give us all faster cast times of more damaging spells to keep us engaged.
Or that, but it would be best if they then took advantage of those weave windows to add a good range of oGCD abilities and dps to weave in, particularly for WHM. Which if they did, could in turn make healer more engaging to play but would be more work to design, so sadly I can't see it happening. I'd rather they didn't just reduce the cooldown time and leave it at that and we're still Glare and Broil spamming into Endwalker.
WHM wouldn't even gain a ton of damage if it never clipped. Top WHM's end fights with maybe 3-4 clips at most which only is a single GCD, yet are still out-damaged by AST and SCH.